


Emily's Story (6)

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [108]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Bigotry & Prejudice, Canon Compliant, Fix-It, Gen, Middle School, POV Female Character, Psi Corps, School, Slice of Life, Telepath culture, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-17
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2019-04-24 04:00:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14347551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Emily meets "laters" for the first time.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!Part 1 of Emily's story ishere. Part 2 ishere. Part 3 ishere. Part 4 ishere. Part 5 ishere.





	Emily's Story (6)

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

When Emily graduated into the Minor Academy at thirteen, she hadn't yet developed telepathy. Few in her cadre had, yet. There would be far bigger changes in Emily's life.

First, her cadre was split up. Though all students here age lived in the Minor Academy dorms, she now shared a room with a girl from a different cadre, and older students lived next door and down the hall. And then the laters started showing up.

Every year, one or two younger students from normal homes would enter the cadres - it was rare, but children did sometimes manifest before puberty. None of those children had been placed into her cadre, and as far as she'd heard, they'd integrated into Corps life without too many problems. There wasn't much choice - they were the only newcomer in an already established world.

But in the Minor Academy, there would be many more of these students. Her initial excitement at getting to meet them at last turned into wariness, even caution very quickly, when she saw how extremely rude they were to her classmates. Not everyone - there was one new girl named Anna who was very quiet and polite, and who Emily liked very much. But most of the others were horrible.

Emily found one of her classmates, Nicole, crying in the hallway outside her room. Nicole was Emily's age, and from a different cadre, but they'd gotten to know one another quickly as soon as they'd moved into the Minor Academy dorms.

"She threw me out of my own room!" Nicole sobbed. "And locked the door!"

Emily knocked on the dorm-room door, asked the roommate to open the door, asked why she was doing this - but there was no response from inside.

Through her sobs, Nicole related what had happened. "She left her stuff all over the floor. Food, wrappers, all kinds of trash. I was picking up her stuff. Putting it away. And suddenly she starts screaming at me not to touch her stuff! Saying I'm invading her privacy! Shouting for me to get out! Get out of her head, get out of her room... This is my room, too! And when I left, she locked the door!"

A small crowd of girls had gathered around the distressed Nicole. When no one could get her roommate to open the door, they summoned a teacher.

Emily was thankful that her roommate - Petra - was at least from the cadres, even if they hadn't grown up in the same group. They had no conflicts between them, and that, at least, afforded them both a quiet place to withdraw, every day after classes, when things got more and more challenging outside their room.

The "laters" came late to class. They hogged the bathrooms and shower time, making the other girls late. They mouthed off when their cadre-raised hallmates told them to share. Emily caught one girl carving her name into one of the tables.

"What the hell are you doing?!" Emily shouted, finally losing her cool after weeks of these disrespectful antics.

"Nothing."

"Nothing? Then what's that?" She pointed.

"I didn't do it."

"That's your own name!"

"I didn't do it."

"I saw you doing it!"

It wasn't long before she realized that these laters didn't just have poor manners - they actually hated the Corps. Emily had always known that mundanes hated the Corps - in the abstract way that one who has never directly experienced bigotry can know there are those out there who hate them - but the lines had always been clear to her. Mundanes were "out there," beyond the gates, and they hate us. Telepaths are "in here," and they're family.

These newcomers were "in here," but they were actually from "out there." They were in the Corps, but they weren't - not in their hearts. She didn't know how to place them. Were they lost? Confused? Angry? She slowly began to realize that some of these newcomers actually hated Emily and everything she stood for, just because of who she was.

And they knew nothing of telepath history. One girl told Emily that massacres against telepaths had never happened, and telepaths were just making it all up to blackmail the Earth Alliance for money.

Horrified, Emily had pulled out a history book and showed her the chapters on the massacres of 2115 and 2156.

The girl rolled her eyes, told her the books were all propaganda and lies, and anyway, even if it happened, telepaths should just get the hell over it already, since it was so long ago. "Stop playing victim," she said. "That was a hundred years ago. Who the fuck cares?"

Emily had always been prepared, emotionally, to face hatred in the outside world. But here, on campus, in her own space... she stood rooted to the spot: frozen, speechless, furious, and entirely at a loss what to do.

How could the Corps have let such people in? she wondered. She wanted them out, gone, whether they were telepathic or not. That the Corps could have let such people in was, to her, a betrayal so deep, she didn't know where even to begin.

**Author's Note:**

> The piece where Nicole's roommate locks her out is both literal and metaphorical.
> 
> Here, the living space does belong to both girls, yet the girl raised as a normal, in the name of protecting her "privacy," locks the Corps-raised girl out. It's how normals operate - in the name of "privacy," it's "everything for me, nothing for you."


End file.
